The official blog of the Campaign for the American Reader, an independent initiative to encourage more readers to read more books.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Pg. 69: "Phantasmagoria"

Marina Warner is a prize-winning writer of fiction, criticism and history; her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of female myths and symbols. Her latest book is Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media.In the Independent (UK), Steven Connor wrote that "Phantasmagoria is a cabinet of familiar wonders: a jetting, generous, humane spree of thought, richly quickened by the life it finds within us and abroad, in our media and machineries of mind."

I asked Marina to apply the "page 69 test" to her book. Here is her reply:

My p 69 is blank! It is the last page of the chapter on 'The Breath of Life' before the turn to the next chapter. It falls in the middle of Phantasmagoria's section on Air, so its emptiness is a kind of visualisation of the invisibility of spirit, my topic, and in many ways perfect symbolism. The page faces a tailpiece image of an Egyptian Ba - the hieroglyph of the Bird-Soul winging its way to the afterlife - and some wonderful airy lines about an angel from Wallace Stevens. On the back, on p 70, which you can just see through the paper, is a naked Mary Magdalene carried aloft in ecstasy by puff cloud cherubim, drawn by Luca Cambiaso with pen and ink. It's odd that a book that is perhaps overstuffed and overrich should be represented in this light and abstract way but I quite like the paradox. Other sections, on Wax, Light, Shadow, Mirror, Ectoplasm, Film, etc., are material and palpable as I wrestle towards understanding how questions about soul and spirit have been put since the end of the eighteenth century and into our own third millennium. We have become more haunted, more populated with spirits, and they are present through many different media in powerful ways. Phantasmagoria explores this throng, from waxworks to zombies.

Marina Warner has made herself mistress of the uncanny and the supernatural as they interweave with European culture. In her latest book she explores the paradox that the Enlightenment and modernity did not put an end to the peculiar attraction to the human mind of “the super-natural and miraculous,” and the desire to explain its mystery. “Curiosity about spirits of every sort and the ideas and imagery which communicate their nature have flourished more vigorously than ever since the 17th century,” she writes. [read the entire review here]

In her Guardian review, Hilary Mantel wrote:

Since the Enlightenment, though many of us have abandoned belief in God, we still believe that something distinctive, something essential, animates human beings and makes them more than the sum of their parts, more than very complex machines. Soul is irreplaceable, it is unique, it is beyond description, and yet if we can't describe it, how can we talk about ourselves? Phantasmagoria is about the words we find for the things that aren't quite there. It is about the images we choose, to bulk out with an illusory form what actually lacks substance, and about the metaphors we use to embody the bodiless. It is about the ways that the dead live: on film, in wax, in those Victorian spirit photographs, so clumsy that nowadays they wouldn't fool a child. It takes us from Dante to JK Rowling, Peter Pan to Jean-Paul Marat, Aristotle to Magritte. It is about fog and smog and celestial clouds, doppelgängers and vampires, magic lanterns and Rorschach blots; it is a book of wonders, with the seductive interest common to the work of our foremost mythographer, and it is a generous book, which sends the reader to other books, to philosophy and poetry, to the history of science and to theology. [read the entire review here]